A former 40 year Atheist analyzes Atheism, without resorting to theism, deism, or fantasy.***If You Don't Value Truth, Then What DO You Value?***If we say that the sane can be coaxed and persuaded to rationality, and we say that rationality presupposes logic, then what can we say of those who actively reject logic?***Atheists have an obligation to give reasons in the form of logic and evidence for rejecting Theist theories.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

CAUTION! ADULTS ONLY - GOVERNMENT PERVERSION ALERT!

[Poster's note: I have copied this from Gateway Pundit. This is the first of two posts there, required to cover the full material. I think it is good to present the vile aspects of this, but I choose not to post the second part because the first is enough to make the point. I have not edited it in any way; the gaps are where images of the actual text were placed in the GP post; these did not transfer.

READ THIS WITH CAUTION: IT CONTAINS EVERY FORM OF PERVERSION - UNCENSORED!]

I was recently approached by a team of independent researchers that I have known for some time and have come to trust. They prepared this report involving ‘Safe Schools Czar’ Kevin Jennings and the organization he founded, GLSEN, and asked that I find a way to help draw attention to what they uncovered. Knowing that Gateway Pundit has followed Kevin Jennings since his appointment, as we have on The B-Cast (here, here, and here), and on Breitbart.tv (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here), I felt this would be an appropriate place for this report.

Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings was the founder, and for many years, Executive Director of an organization called the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). GLSEN started essentially as Jennings’ personal project and grew to become the culmination of his life’s work. And he was chosen by President Obama to be the nation’s Safe Schools Czar primarily because he had founded and led GLSEN (scroll for bio).

GLSEN’s stated mission is to empower gay youth in the schools and to stop harassment by other students. It encourages the formation of Gay Student Alliances and condemns the use of hateful words. GLSEN also strives to influence the educational curriculum to include materials which the group believes will increase tolerance of gay students and decrease bullying. To that end, GLSEN maintains a recommended reading list of books that it claims “furthers our mission to ensure safe schools for all students.” In other words, these are the books that GLSEN’s directors think all kids should be reading: gay kids should read them to raise their self-esteem, and straight kids should read them in order to become more aware and tolerant and stop bullying gay kids. Through GLSEN’s online ordering system, called “GLSEN BookLink,” featured prominently on their Web site, teachers can buy the books to use as required classroom assignments, or students can buy them to read on their own.

According to GLSEN’s own press releases from the period during which its recommended reading list was developed, the organization’s three areas of focus were creating “educational resources, public policy agenda, [and] student organizing programs”; in other words, the reading list (chief among its “educational resources”) was of prime importance in GLSEN’s efforts to influence the American educational system.

The list is divided into three main categories: books recommended for grades K-6; books recommended for grades 7-12; and books for teachers. (The books on the list span all genres: fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, even poetry.)

Out of curiosity to see exactly what kind of books Kevin Jennings and his organization think American students should be reading in school, our team chose a handful at random from the over 100 titles on GLSEN’s grades 7-12 list, and began reading through.

What we discovered shocked us. We were flabbergasted. Rendered speechless.

We were unprepared for what we encountered. Book after book after book contained stories and anecdotes that weren’t merely X-rated and pornographic, but which featured explicit descriptions of sex acts between pre-schoolers; stories that seemed to promote and recommend child-adult sexual relationships; stories of public masturbation, anal sex in restrooms, affairs between students and teachers, five-year-olds playing sex games, semen flying through the air. One memoir even praised becoming a prostitute as a way to increase one’s self-esteem. Above all, the books seemed to have less to do with promoting tolerance than with an unabashed attempt to indoctrinate students into a hyper-sexualized worldview.

We knew that unless we carefully documented what we were reading, the public would have a hard time accepting it. Mere descriptions on our part could not convey the emotional gut reaction one gets when seeing what Kevin Jennings wants kids to read as school assignments. So we began scanning pages from each of the books, and then made exact transcriptions of the relevant passages on each page.

Are we exaggerating, or misconstruing quotes that could be interpreted a different way? No: Read the passages below and judge for yourself. There’s no wiggle room. The language is explicit, the intent clear.

To be specific, the books we read were:

Queer 13

Being Different

The Full Spectrum

Revolutionary Voices

Reflections of a Rock Lobster

Passages of Pride

Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian

The Order of the Poison Oak

In Your Face

Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son

Love & Sex: Ten Stories of Truth

We can only vouch for what’s in these 11 books, since these are the only ones we’ve read through. Are there other books on the GLSEN reading list that are similarly outrageous? We can’t say for sure, but it seems very likely. What you see excerpted below is probably only the tip of the iceberg.

Let it be clear: This issue has nothing to do with gayness or straightness, which is irrelevant to this report. The point proven here is that the GLSEN reading list promotes the sexualization of children in general, regardless of the “orientation.”

And this is not about censorship: It’s about deciding what constitutes appropriate reading material for children. We’re perfectly OK with these books existing and being read by adults; we only start to worry when these books are assigned to children. All sorts of books are excluded from school reading lists, for all sorts of reasons. Even many books once considered classics are now considered off-limits due to language or attitudes now deemed inappropriate. And yet, according to Kevin Jennings and GLSEN, books about a 13-year-old getting “my cock sucked and my ass fucked” or about a teenager enjoying the “exquisite bitter taste” of his friend’s semen are not just acceptable, they’re highly recommended. As GLSEN’s own site says, “All BookLink items are reviewed by GLSEN staff for quality and appropriateness of content.” Really? (Note: GLSEN does advise adults to “review content for suitability.”)

Although GLSEN does not address how books get added to its list, it’s hard to imagine that they are chosen by low-level staffers or volunteers, with no oversight. Since the list of recommended books is one of the organization’s primary tools (”The GLSEN BookLink, an online library of recommended resources, along with the Safe Space program remain cornerstones of GLSEN’s education work.” source), it’s likely that the books were chosen carefully. Kevin Jennings stepped down as Executive Director last year after leading GLSEN since its inception, but every single book mentioned in this report was added to the list while Jennings was in charge (dates are given for each title’s addition to the list). Therefore, it’s reasonable to believe he was aware of the addition of these works – especially since most were added when GLSEN was still quite small and the Executive Director had a hands-on role in daily operations.

Below you will find dozens of excerpts taken from books on the GLSEN “Booklink” recommended reading list for grades 7-12 (i.e. for children between the ages of 12 and 17). To prove that these books are indeed recommended by GLSEN for children, click on each book’s title to see its individual listing on the GLSEN Web site. And to prove that each excerpt is transcribed exactly as it appears in each book, click on the page numbers or the small images along the left to see scans taken directly of the book pages in question. (Ellipses ["..."] indicate unrelated passages not included in some of the transcriptions; click on the full-page scans to see the complete extended quotes.) Each passage is preceded by a brief summary, given in italics.

You decide for yourself if you think these are appropriate for kids as young as 12 years old to read. And then decide if you think the man who headed the organization responsible for recommending these books to children should be in charge of school safety in this country.

Content Warning:

Keep in mind that, although the material below has been deemed by Kevin Jennings and GLSEN to be appropriate for children, some of the excerpts contain explicit language and pornographic descriptions, so if you don’t want to see such things, stop reading now.

(At the age of six, the author frequently performed fellatio on his fellow first-graders in the school restroom, part of a “busy homosexual childhood.”)

My sexual exploits with my neighborhood playmates continued. I lived a busy homosexual childhood, somehow managing to avoid venereal disease through all my toddler years. By first grade I was sexually active with many friends. In fact, a small group of us regularly met in the grammar school lavatory to perform fellatio on one another. A typical week’s schedule would be Aaron and Michael on Monday during lunch; Michael and Johnny on Tuesday after school; Fred and Timmy at noon Wednesday; Aaron and Timmy after school on Thursday. None of us ever got caught, but we never worried about it anyway. We all understood that what we were doing was not to be discussed freely with adults but we viewed it as a fun sort of confidential activity. None of us had any guilty feelings about it; we figured everyone did it. Why shouldn’t they?

(A man masturbates and explicitly ejaculates as he sits on a hill overlooking his hometown.)

I sit down on the hard ground and cry a little. I fish my aged cock out of my jeans as though I can mark the scene with pleasure so later I can find it and reread it for understanding. Once imagined, it is my responsibility to jack off in front of it all. The air feels funny on my cock, which usually squirms like a larva in the darkness; it’s more sensitive than I am to the prickle of a slight breeze. There is nothing to arouse me except myself. My tract looks so boring, its emptiness so lacks potential, that I can almost believe in reality, since here is appearance spreading out at my feet. It only takes a minute. My crotch rings like an alarm clock, some pump mechanism kicks in, and after short flights my sperm falls on the gray dirt. I feet edgy and shallow, emptied out by the day ahead, and twinges of residual pleasure make me twitch.

(A 13-year-old boy has a violent sexual encounter with an older man, which causes the boy to become desperate for sex, and he ends up spending the rest of the year promiscuously getting “my cock sucked and my ass fucked” by “a seemingly endless supply of dicks” belonging to older men, concluding with “I really did enjoy those sexual encounters.”)

One day, on the bus to shop class, this ugly fuck of a man sat behind me and put his foot in the crack of my seat. He was skinny, with a patchy, pencil-thin mustache that besotted his oily face. I ignored him for most of the trip. I did notice that he changed buses when I did, but this time he sat beside me. He tried a little small talk, but then he suddenly and very nervously put his hand on my crotch. It never occurred to me to tell him not to. I’m not sure if I agreed to it or not, but he managed to get me to follow him to a nearby rest room at another secondary school “to play.” In the bathroom stall, lit by two scant rows of fluorescent lights, half of them burnt-out or flickering, he tried to kiss me, but I was too nauseated to do that. He sucked my nipples and played with my cock. I had no idea what to do. He then tried to get me to suck his. Somehow I knew this was expected of me, but I just could not put his ugly, foul-smelling penis into my mouth. When he forced it in I gagged so hard I started vomiting. Undaunted, he tried to put his cock in my ass. Thankfully, he came prematurely. He pulled up his trousers and left me in the toilet stall confused, frightened, crying, and praying to God for forgiveness of my horrible sin. I spent a good deal of time locked in the stall, trying to clean up, trying to wipe the smell of that act off with wet toilet paper, but I was doused in the stench of that man and what he had done.

This incident should have soured me on men, but it only made me more confused and needful. One day later, something accidental happened that would change my life. I discovered that at a urinal I could actually see someone else’s penis. I was ecstatic and fearful, but I wanted more. One day, at a local shopping mall, as I was trying to sneak a peek at penises in the rest rooms, a man at the urinal actually turned to me and started playing with himself. He flashed me a gold-toothed smirk and motioned for me to come over. Shocked, I zippered up and ran out, but the seeds had been laid. The whole world of rest-room sex had opened itself up to me.

Soon I was spending a great deal of time hanging out in shopping malls and cruising the rest rooms for sexual encounters. My rest-room exploits started to be a great burden on my mind. The better part of the year was spent making deals with God, asking for a sign, then ignoring and rationalizing everything I perceived to be a sign, praying for forgiveness, and being obsessed with raging hormones and a seemingly endless supply of dicks. I believed that it was all part of a test by God to see if I was a sinner. I was.

I had known before that something was up, and that I was attracted to men, but this toilet thing was a whole new realm of sin and Satan, a new level that I had never before imagined. The following years were spent praying for forgiveness and trying to purge my homosexuality through prayer and Bible study. While my classmates wondered what sex was like, content to masturbate over pinups, I was out there having my cock sucked and my ass fucked. These were grown men I was tricking with. Some were nice, grateful for a young boy to have their way with. Some were harsh and mean. There were a few nasty encounters, brutal and painful experiences, near-rapes, but through it all, I never thought that I had the ability to say no.

I was scared about what I was doing, scared of God’s judgment and of being caught in all those rest rooms and parks, but I really did enjoy those sexual encounters. That feeling of doing it to them and them doing the same for me was just too damn good.

(The author vividly describes masturbating and ejaculating whenever and wherever possible, at the age of 13.)

Jacking off into the toilet, into the slit between pushed-together beds, into paper-towel tubes (Ugh, my little sister shouts, what’s this stuff?), in the shower, while standing in the crotch of a tree, while standing on my head. What belongs to me except the next orgasm? Even shame is not mine. I can’t afford to fantasize or to connect mind and body. Strip poker with Mike Cogan: Since we’re naked, we might as well masturbate. Don’t look, he keeps whining. His orgasm is like him, a pipsqueak.

(A writer is unhappy that she was forced to stop masturbating in public when she turned nine years old.)

I learned the truth about Santa Claus and masturbation in the same year. I was 9. I had a hunch about Santa, but I had no clue about masturbation. I mean, I had no clue there was anything wrong with it. As far as I know, I’ve been masturbating my whole life. But it wasn’t until 9 that I realized it was an impulse that you had to turn off. Especially in class. Fourth grade craft time taught me shame.

(An interview with a “sex worker” who praises prostitution as a way to raise one’s self-esteem and have empowering sexual experiences.)

Minal is a young queer from India and has been a sex worker in the S/M scene for a year and a half. He has taken a break from sex work and lives in San Francisco. In this interview Minal talks about his journey into sex work as a way of uplifting his self-esteem around body-image issues, his feeling of empowerment doing sex work in drag…

…

S: How did you get into sex work?

M: Well, before I get into that I have to tell you how I got into S/M generally, since I used to be a complete vanilla bottom. I’m gay, by the way; I’m exploring being transgendered, and I’ve been doing drag for about ten years, on and off. Drag was never a sexual thing for me, I’ve always had sex “as a guy.” Around March of last year a friend asked me about rape fantasies—she wanted to know what my fantasies were. I realized I hadn’t been fantasizing at all. When I did start thinking about it, my fantasies were all about whipping. I started reading up on S/M, and it was making me interested in sex for the first time. Before, I never knew what the big deal was with sex. I put a personal ad in the paper to do scenes with different people, and I realized that for what I was doing, I could be getting good money. I had a lot of friends in the sex industry who were asking me, “Why aren’t you charging for what you’re doing?”

So that summer I did it for free and learned what I needed to do, and by November I started putting out ads in the Bay Area Reporter. My ads were sort of genderfuck: my picture was taken from the neck down in a corset, fishnets and garter belt. It was a dom-type look. I realized there weren’t that many guys into doing S/M professionally, and the ones that were were really butch—so I stood out a lot. It was great. It was the first time I had really good sex, I was getting paid for it, and I felt totally in control. It was good, but I was wondering how many people I was losing by advertising as a fem dom. I started putting ads online without the fem look and got a lot more response, so I switched to just having a nude picture in the paper as opposed to a girlish one. The responses were more than I could handle, which is a good thing. That’s how I got into sex work, as a way of exploring my sexuality.

…

S: How has your self-image improved from doing sex work?

M: I feel a lot more confident and secure with myself. I think that has a lot to do with S/M and coming into my own power.

(The author describes how a sudden and impulsive sexual encounter was the healthiest relationship he’s ever had, then regrets the incestuous relationship he had with his cousin.)

But I know in the immediate future I want a very healthy relationship, because I’ve never really had a healthy relationship. The closest I’ve had was with a guy that I met at the lake when we lived in Davenport. I just met him at the lake, and he already had a boyfriend and stuff. I just walked up to him and said, “Do you want to fuck?” and we did. For a week. And then I went home because I couldn’t handle it anymore. The relationship I had with my cousin was very, very twisted, and I didn’t like hiding it. I mean, he was my cousin, and so it feels rather disgusting. But I think that you’re gonna fall in love with whomever you’re gonna fall in love with.

(A 15-year-old boy embarks on an intense sexual relationship with a much older adult man.)

Near the end of summer, just before starting his sophomore year in high school, Dan picked up a weekly Twin Cities newspaper. Scanning the classifieds, he came upon an ad for a “Man-2-Man” massage. Home alone one day, he called the telephone number listed in the ad and set up an appointment to meet a man named Tom. Tom offered to drive to Zimmerman. So, over the phone, Dan directed him to a secluded road in his subdivision. “Stop where the pavement ends,” Dan told him.

A couple of nights later, Dan pulled the broken screen from his bedroom window and slipped out of the house while his parents slept. He hurried to the prearranged rendezvous spot, and there, in the dark of night, he met Tom for the first time, man-to-man. In the back of Tom’s van, the two had sex.

“He gave me a little shoulder rub and the next thing I knew his hands were all over me,” Dan remembers. “It wasn’t a bad thing. I didn’t necessarily know it would turn into sex. But I knew what I was doing.”

Dan continued his liaisons with Tom throughout the summer and into the following school year, having sex—usually masturbation and oral sex—with Tom in his van or his Minneapolis apartment.

…

Even though Tom was older, almost twice Dan’s age, Dan felt unthreatened by him. Dan admits Tom was a “troll” in every sense of the word—an older closeted gay man seeking sex with a man much younger. But Dan says he was not intimidated by the discrepancy in their ages. “He kind of had me in a corner in that he knew I didn’t have access to anything I wanted.” says Dan. “But everything was consensual.”

…

“He wasn’t exactly a friend,” Dan says of his relationship with Tom. “He wasn’t exactly a lover. He wasn’t exactly a role model. He wasn’t exactly anything. What I got out of it was sex, and someone who made me feel nice for once. Sex was a totally different way to feel good. It was a very easy way to get away from the pain. I was young. He brought me down to the city, where I wanted to be. And I was very young.”

(Two twelve-year-old boys turn up the volume on a Christian song to drown out the noises of them having sex.)

I began sleeping over at Bob’s house again during seventh grade. His mother thought we enjoyed a perfectly platonic relationship in his room upstairs playing games and listening to Jim Nabors records – the only ones she allowed Bob to hear.

Little did she know that every night I slept over we would turn the record player loud and have sex to the beat of “Lord, You Gave Me a Mountain.”

(The narrator describes how at the age of 16 he began having sex with a 25-year-old man he met at a gay youth group.)

I don’t remember exactly when I started coming out, but I joined this youth group called Positive Images; it’s the Sonoma County gay/lesbian/bisexual youth group. I got a boyfriend instantly; he picked me up right away, right when I joined the group. He was older; he was twenty-five, I was sixteen. He was just really supportive of me. I went with him to this gay prom in Sonoma County called the Rainbow Prom in the middle of May.

…

So there was one night when I stayed at my boyfriend’s house. I lost my virginity to him a couple weeks before that, and so I stayed at his house, and I was feeling good when I went home the next day. It was the first time that I actually spent the night there and stayed the whole night. So I went home and I was in a great mood.

(A woman recalls how as a teenager she had a sexual affair with an adult teacher at her high school, which greatly boosted the girl’s self-esteem.)

While still in high school, she had an affair with a teacher. “She was forty-four and had a daughter who was a year younger than me, who went to my school. Needless to say, it was all very confusing, but exciting as well. The moment right after we kissed for the first time, I ran to the mirror and looked at myself. I was ecstatic. I thought I would look different. I said in a barely audible whisper, ‘I’m a lesbian.’ About six months later, we stopped being physically sexual, at my request. I was racked with guilt feelings and knew that it was out of control. I was terrified of someone finding out….”

(A gay priest recalls a life-changing incident at the age of ten, when he “felt my penis begin to harden” after meeting a new friend, after which the author “touched the flesh of his cock.”)

One summer when I was about ten, my mother and I spent several weeks at a big resort hotel in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York State. …

…

Strange how all foreboding vanished when I first caught sight of Jamie checking into the hotel with his mother and father. The desire I felt for him was sudden and electric. …

…

As we changed in the dressing room by the swimming pool, I glanced very quickly to find out what his genitals looked like, but his back was turned to me as he slipped on his trunks. Still I knew I’d find out, somehow. …

…

I remember the fright I felt when there was no more to take off but my underpants, the strange sense of relief when I stood naked by the shadowed pool, the throat-tightening excitement of seeing Jamie’s slight lithe body, as naked as mine.

We tucked our clothes under the embankment. Then, with a whoop, Jamie dived into the pool. I stood on the pool’s edge, watched Jamie’s body squirming beneath the water’s surface, and felt my penis begin to harden.

Jamie broke the surface with a splash and looked at me. A quick grin crossed his face. “Dive in! It’s great!”

I glanced down and saw that my cock was fully erected.

…

“C’mon, we’ll wrestle. that’ll warm you up.” He grabbed me around the neck and pushed me back on the sand. The warmth of his body sent chills through mine. I struggled (although not very convincingly, I’m afraid) against his grip and we rolled on the sand and I finally pinioned him on his back, astride him, my hands holding his arms.

He looked up at me. “Uncle,” he whispered.

I released his arms. They glided around my neck, pulling my head down to his. I stretched full length on top of him, our heads touching. Our heavy breathing from the struggle gradually subsided. I felt my penis grow hard against his body, and, pressed against mine, I felt his grow hard too. I raised my head and looked at his face. He was looking at me. After a long moment I lowered my head till our lips touched. And held.

Then I moved over on my side next to him, and my hand reached down, slowly, until I touched the flesh of his cock. It stiffened still more and Jamie’s hips stirred. I felt a wonder. I had caused this to happen to someone else. Someone else felt as I did. I wasn’t alone. There was Jamie. And now we had our secret.

(The author recalls with mixed emotions the sexual relationship he had with his cousin starting at the age of 12.)

Despite my best efforts, someday the artifice of “normality” had to fall away. It did, early one Sunday afternoon when I was twelve. My cousin was sixteen.

I put on my blue velour robe and padded down the rickety stairs. My cousin was watching an old black-and-white movie on our black-and-white TV set. He wore only his Ewing High School J.V. basketball shorts, black with waxy yellow lettering. I sat next to him on the couch, silent. He would occasionally sneak glances at me. The glances grew longer and longer.

I noticed his slightly parted thick lips. Uncomfortable, I stood up and went to the front door. I pretended to look out the window up Field Avenue. The street was empty.

My cousin got up from the couch and stood behind me. He lightly brushed the soft fabric of my robe. “Let’s get gay,” he fawned in a mock faggy tone. “Let’s get gay.” He rubbed his huge hands over the thin fabric that separated them from my behind. He pulled up the robe.

Exposed and naked, my erection to the wind, I wanted to melt into his arms, to be held by him, to desperately answer the questions my soul had been avoiding, but I also wanted to shield my eyes from what was happening.

We went back to the couch, and I felt someone’s hands on my genitals for the first time. They were boiling—his hands and my genitals. I sat back and closed my eyes.

My ecstasy from his touch. My relief from loneliness. Momentarily overcoming fear and shame. Then, the fall. Each of the half-dozen times we did it over the next four years it would be that way. While we were in the act, it was good. His heavy brown body lying against mine, providing the warmth I never thought I would have. He was tender and sweet. But after I came, shame tumbled on top of me, the pleasure buried, suffocated. The disgraceful white goo the physical proof of my spiritual delinquency.

(At the age of six, the author played “sex therapist” with a five-year-old friend, and “explored our sexuality to its fullest.”)

One friend I was very close to was Billy Marlen. Billy was a year behind me in school yet we got along well together. In our friendship, a special camaraderie existed that was rare in my other friendships. There was a brotherhood that does not often occur even between brothers. We shared our toys and spent many summer days building sandcastles on the beach. On rainy days I’d walk down to Billy’s house where we spent the day reading books and building racetracks and playing sex therapist in his basement. We were human beings who knew no social inhibitions and were willing to explore our sexuality to its fullest.

(The author describes his promiscuous sex life while in elementary school.)

Sex continued for me but it was not the same as it was with Billy. It was always readily available after school, during school, at cub scouts, at Sunday School or at summer camp, but that certain element that Billy added was gone.

(The narrator describes the sexual relations he had with various adult men when he was 16 years old.)

I was dating this twenty-five-year-old guy. But then we broke up, because I was messing around with this other guy who was a friend of his, this twenty-seven-year-old, and I was only sixteen. It wasn’t really a right thing, I don’t think, because I knew they were only attracted to me because I was young, and it wasn’t even like they were attracted to me because of my personality or anything like that. So I dated the twenty-seven-year-old for a little bit, and then we broke up, and I got back together with my old boyfriend, and then we broke up again.

When I was with my first boyfriend, we went to a rave; I felt like we could dance together and stuff, and we could kiss and it was cool. But I still felt kind of weird. I used him. And when I was with him, I was really out. I would hold hands everywhere, kiss in public. But it wasn’t so much that I wanted to be kissing him as much as I wanted to be able to be that out; I wanted to get comfortable with it.

I met this one guy in the city, and he came up with us, back up to Petaluma, and we hung out that night. We just totally talked. He was this really cool person. We had sex, and it was really good—five hours of foreplay. That was rad, and I just felt like I could talk to him, like we could really relate. So he came back down to the city, and then I called him that night, or I called him the next day or something, and asked him to come up, and so he rode the bus up, stayed at my house that night, and we had sex again.

He was just rad; he had the body type that I like, a little pale and kind of scrawny–kinda skaterish, like a toned-all-over body. Anyway, so then he went back to the city, and I was supposed to come down to the city and stay at his house on Friday. I called his house and his roommate said, “Maddy doesn’t live here anymore; he went back to Michigan.” He never called me and he’s never called me or written me since then. It was really fucked. I even think that I am in love with him because I just think about him every day. I don’t even know if I’ve ever been in love before this.

(Beginning at the age of five, a young child has sexual encounters with his playmates.)

Throughout his childhood, from age five on, Derek would sneak off with a friend into someone’s basement or the woods along the back alley, where they would take off their pants and play with each other, usually fondling each other’s genitals. It became habitual.

“At that time, I didn’t quite have a name for it,” says Derek. “It was something that I liked doing, that felt good, that I wanted to do as often as I could. The other kids always recognized it as being something bad and dirty. And all I wanted to know was, When can we do it again?”

(A man recounts how he had his first sexual experience at age 12, and then recalls fondly the anal sex he had at fifteen with a much older man.)

“I just remember, when I was twelve or so, Derek walking into my room and finding me making out with Timmy Musseo. And he just said excuse me and closed the door.”

Philip’s jaw dropped. “You were making out with boys when you were twelve?”

“Eleven,” Eliot said. “Geoffrey and Derek only found out when I was twelve.”

“Then how old were you when you first had sex?”

Eliot shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “How do you define sex? If orgasm is the criterion, twelve. If anal or oral penetration is necessary, fifteen.”

“And was that with Timmy Musseo?”

“No, no,” Eliot said “Timmy Musseo had a girlfriend by that time. My first experience was with a much older man, a friend of Derek’s. He and Geoffrey never found out about it. Probably they still don’t know.”

“How old is older?”

“Oh, let’s see,” Eliot said. “When I was fifteen, he must have been twenty-nine, thirty. My age now. He came and stayed with me at the house whenever Derek and Geoffrey went away.”

“Did he seduce you?”

“I seduced him,” Eliot said, and laughed. “Oh, he wanted to for as long as I did. But I think he was afraid Derek would send him up for statutory rape or something. I was irresistible at fifteen. I kept asking him to give me massages, playing the little nubile waif. And finally–well, he couldn’t hold back anymore.” He sighed. “It was a wild night. We did everything.”

The term diversity has become more than trite these days. Slap a rainbow flag on your car and you’re well on the way to “diverse” liberalism. A true commitment to diversity, however, requires a closer look at the privileges and oppressions simultaneously affecting each of us and a recognition of both public and private means of resistance. In many ways I have privilege: I am white, middle-class, and attending college. These factors grant me certain societally bestowed benefits. In other ways, I am systemically oppressed: as a woman, as a youth, as a person with cerebral palsy, as a bisexual queer. With these attributes, I fail to meet the optimal requirements for functioning in this white-supremacist, capitalist heteropatriarchy.

If you are not part of the system in the optimal way (i.e., as a straight, white, middle-class or upwardly mobile, Christian male), you pose a threat to that dominant system.

(A 13-year-old boy carefully inspects his friend’s genitals, admiring the size of his penis; then the author describes each of their masturbation techniques.)

“How old are you, twelve? I had pubes when I was twelve,” Donnie said in disbelief.

“I’m thirteen and I do have some pubes,” I said. “Just not a lot.”

Donnie moved toward me. “‘Let’s see. I bet you’ve got more than you think.” I started to unzip my fly to show him when his mom yelled again for us to turn the music down before she came down and did it herself. I nervously zipped my jeans back up.

Donnie said, “It’s weird. I’m only two years older than you, but look at mine.” He sat on the edge of his bed and slid his jeans down to his knees. He pulled on his pubes and showed me how thick his hair was. He wasn’t self-conscious at all. It felt like he was showing me a science project or something. He let me examine his dick and pubes close up. I had never seen that much pubic hair that close before. I only had a few pubic hairs, but I kept a vigilant watch over them. I counted them and watched them grow. I knew whenever a new one appeared. Donnie’s pubes looked so good, so exciting to me. Blood started rushing around me. I felt warm. I felt happy and hopeful at the thought that someday soon I would have that much, too. Donnie was proud of himself. That close, his pubic hair looked like a dense forest. There was a dark moist smell. Kind of familiar, but different from my own. More like a man smell than a boy smell. I was in awe not only of his pubes but because I wanted to have a dick the size of his, with all that hair. Compared to Donnie’s mature dick with that thick bush at its base, mine was a naked pencil. I was surprised that his dick was big. He was kind of overweight, just a big kid really. I told him I thought fat guys had small dicks. He didn’t get upset that I called him fat. He said matter-of-factly, “Some of ‘em do.”

He spread the Playboy open on the bed and showed me how he jacked off. I sat next to him and watched as he spit in his hand and rubbed it on the head of his dick. Then he wrapped his hand around his dick and moved it quickly up and down. He didn’t get very hard. It was just a demonstration. I was too shy to tell him how I did it. When I masturbated I had to be quiet so I wouldn’t wake up my brothers. I lay on my stomach and humped the mattress until I came. My sheets always had yellow crusty stains on them, but my mother never mentioned it even though she was the one who washed them.

(A girl describes how she became “fuck buddies” with another girl while at the same time having a boyfriend.)

The girls I have gone out with have been high school age or a little bit older. I went out with this girl Jennay, and with her, it was just total attractiveness. I got to know her on a different level, and we became lovers. It’s funny to say it, but we didn’t really relate emotionally. So we sort of became fuck buddies. This was actually going on at the same time I was going out with Mark, so it was kinda bad.

The little man in a checked sports jacket stands too close to me at the urinal. Is he subnormal? Doesn’t he understand social distance? He has an accent—British? Cockney? Maybe he’s wearing a bowler? “Excuse me?”

“Xxxx’x x xxxx xxxx xxx xxxx xxxxx.”

“What?”

“That’s a nice cock you have there.” He’s offering his, a prim pink boutonniere; I can see why he likes mine better. A nice cock? Is it separate from my body, which is not nice? Separate, like my beautiful eyes? He’s will-less as a dust bunny, and when I tap him on the shoulder, he drifts away.

Later, in a smelly gas-station toilet, I realize the wad of toilet paper left on top of the dispenser is filled with someone’s sperm. Some pervert left it there, I tell myself wonderingly. To be found, I add. And recognized. As what? An offering, an assertion? I don’t forget to be grossed out. I smell it—sure enough, sperm. Consciousness the predicament, orgasm the escape. I look around for the masturbator as though I’m dreaming, as though I can hear his I’m coming noises.

(The author mentions how, while in fifth and sixth grade [age 10 and 11], he often had sex with his male classmates.)

Fortunately, even though being homosexual laid heavily on my conscience during fifth and sixth grades, sex was nevertheless still available. No feelings of guilt entered my mind when having sex with other boys because sex was something spontaneous, and a satisfaction of certain needs.

(At the age of 12, the author reports being taken aback when the friend with whom he frequently had gay sex asked him “What would you do if you had some pussy right now?”)

As I entered seventh grade, I noticed that kids were changing physically as well as socially.

…

Interestingly, Bob Cote and I began a sexual relationship. In fact, we had sex together quite frequently. So I was completely taken by surprise one day at the lunch table when he tried to initiate me into the conversation about heterosexuality.

“How about you, Aaron, what would you do if you had some pussy right now?”

(The narrator regrets that as a teenager he was too shy to hook up with an older man.)

I’ve never been with a guy yet. I was tempted once. I was in this store–a clothes shop or something. Well, this guy was looking at me and my friend pointed it out. I was gonna go up and talk to the guy, but the guy was twenty-something. He was good-looking, too. This was like a year and a half ago or something. I was really screwed up—not sure how I felt. I didn’t say anything. I remembered going home and wishing that I had said something.

(A memoir in which the author begins masturbating at the age of nine, later bemoaning the culture which said it was not OK.)

I discovered masturbation when I was nine. But because of other Christian peers and teachers, I learned it was not OK. According to them, the only time a woman should be sexual was after she got married. My parents did not talk about sex or sexual orientation. The only thing my mother told me was, “Don’t get raped.” She did not describe what it meant to be raped, let alone what it meant to have a healthy relationship, to have sexual intercourse, or the consequences thereof. How was I to know how I could protect myself? How could I protect myself when I wasn’t confident in my own body?

I am five and Katie is six. Her birthday is in September. Mine is in June. We are both in kindergarten, she in the p.m. class and me in the a.m., but we go to day care together. We are best friends.

…

Today I am going to Katie’s for a playdate.

…

Katie pulls her shorts off. She is wearing blue and white polka-dotted Hanes underwear, the kind that I have at home. They come in a three-pack with a matching blue pair and a matching white pair. She lies down on her floor and pulls her underwear off over her butt, and tells me to spank her because she’s the baby and I’m the mommy. It seems kind of weird and she yells at me to do it. Then she makes me be the baby and she spanks me, too. She tells me that I should learn how to French-kiss because boys always do that, so she kisses me and puts her tongue in my mouth. I roll my tongue hot-dog style, because that is fun.

Her mommy drives me home, and in the backseat of her white car Katie Frenches me again.

We are in second grade now, and Katie still makes me practice Frenching her.

(A group of 9- and 10-year-old boys all get erections together in a tent.)

Sleep-away camp lent itself to exploration as well. The summer between fourth and fifth grade I learned what an erection was. Six guys in a tent without a parental figure and instructed to go to bed had no intention of falling asleep until our eyelids felt like anvils. At some point, the conversation turned to sex. And that same friend who enjoyed mooning the guys also instructed us, using his own body for visual proof, as to what an erection was. Soon after, we were all erect, with very little inkling that what we were doing would be considered by some to be wrong.

(The author discusses the psychological issues his sex partner experienced when they were both 12 years old.)

My school life was becoming lonelier. Most of my former friends ignored me. Bob and I stayed friendly and kept up our sex life together, but many times Bob also talked about fantasies with females and salami. Bob felt guilty about having sex with me and pretended that we never did. It was frustrating because now, more than ever, I wanted to communicate with someone about my sexuality – but there was no one available. Although Bob provided sexual stimulation, there was little other communication between us; he was too inhibited. In fact, one time he refused to have sex unless we first hypnotized each other into being different people: he would be a woman while satisfying me, and then we would switch. I went along with it but felt ridiculous when the two identities he had chosen for us turned out to be Ann-Margret and Jaclyn Smith. My part was Ann-Margret, of course.

(The narrator describes how the other teens in his social circle “have sex all the time” and “go down to the Castro and pick up guys.”)

With queer kids I meet outside of the youth group, it’s the only thing we have in common is that we’re gay and we’re young. They just go to clubs and get fucked up and have sex all the time. They go down to the Castro and pick up guys. And I know it’s their internalized homophobia and that kind of stuff and they’re dealing with that.

Troy and Jordan soon discovered they shared a common secret—they both were infatuated with boys. They would compare their affections for boys they knew at their school and tease each other about their latest crushes. Both admired one boy in particular, a second-grader named Kelly. Kelly was exceptionally good-looking. Troy remembers thinking he was the type of boy who surely would grow up to be strikingly handsome. Troy and Jordan vied unabashedly for his attention, pushing and elbowing to sit by his side during lunch, and showing off during recess. It was Jordan who won out, finally capturing Kelly’s interest. He invited Kelly over to his home, where they would roll and tumble together on an old mattress down in the basement, out of sight of any adult, kissing and hugging under blankets and sheets, sometimes without their clothes.

(A girl describes how at the age of 12 she announced to her entire elementary school that she is a lesbian.)

Coming Out in Middle School

I first began to come out when I was 11. In terms of my family, I was fortunate because my parents have always been accepting of my sexual identity. It was really great to have their backing, especially considering that a lot of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people don’t have that kind of family support. I come from a political, staunchly liberal family; I guess you could say I inherited my parents’ socialist genes. However, the school I was going to when I came out was immensely different from my home situation.

I was in sixth grade and attending a Catholic school in San Francisco when I came out to a small group of people. (I was actually raised in an agnostic household, but the Catholic school was three blocks away from where I lived.) My fellow students had already assumed I was a queer because I defended queer people and got angry at folks in my class when they said the word “faggot.” So of course they were making accusations about my sexuality left and right. Still, I didn’t feel comfortable coming out to all of them.

During this time I started attending LYRIC, the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center, a wonderful program and hang-out space for LGBT youth in San Francisco. Just hanging out with other queer youth and finding a place where I could get support was incredible. Programs that give queer youth a space to be safe are really important, and I know that finding LYRIC helped me out a lot.

The next year I was in seventh grade. At that point I was tired of being harassed, and I had gotten to a place in my life where I could actually deal with the harassment and stand up to people who hurt me. I realized I could only be happy if I was honest with the people around me. So at the age of 12 1 came out to my entire elementary school, which included grades K-8.

(As a six-year-old, the author became sexually aroused by Batman and GI Joe, and “messed around” with his playmates.)

One day when I was about six, while watching a Batman episode with Cheryl, I casually commented on the anatomical proportions of Batman. I knew no reason to stifle my aroused sexual feelings, so I just mentioned that I liked what I saw. Cheryl freaked out. It was my first lesson that talking about this subject made people upset.

This was the first time I had spoken of my sexual thoughts although I had been having those thoughts for as long as I could remember. Already I was undressing my GI Joe dolls, and I had messed around with some of my male playmates, but it never crossed my mind to mention my feelings to anyone.

(Two 11-year-old boys sneak into a school closet to have a sexual encounter, but are interrupted by a teacher before they can begin.)

Something was in the air, and it wasn’t just pot smoke. But at age eleven I was alert to it, sniffing it out like a caged animal keenly sensing freedom. That year was an awakening for me. Puberty struck like violent spring weather. The boys of my new school, East Meadow Elementary in Palo Alto, were sexual boys, and I had never been cast among sexual boys before. It’s not that they were having sex; rather, they radiated sex, its power and allure. We were a school of boys coming into sticky heat. We got hard in our pants, grabbed at one another’s crotches, traded sex drawings we sketched covertly during class. We talked solemnly about the mysterious and exciting changes happening to our bodies, the public hair some of us were beginning to sprout, our nipples that felt strangely sensitive. Overnight we became achingly aware of our penises.

In the school library there was a supplies closet where some of the boys, it was rumored, went when the library wasn’t in use. One spring afternoon, as Lex Bancroft and I, unsupervised, shelved books—an honor bestowed from time to time on A students—he confided to me that he and Brian Freeman had gone to the closet the week before. The window shades were down to indicate the library was closed, but still the afternoon light suffused the room with a tender glow. Lex hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans and splayed his fingers against his pelvis as if in triumph. Did I want to go? he wondered.

Those of us who had not been to the closet could only speculate about what, exactly, went on in there. I felt a bright spasm of longing–everything in the room seemed at once vague and luminous; we were on the verge, I sensed, of something truly amazing–when the door opened and our teacher, Mr. Bouchner, appeared to tell us the news that Martin Luther King had just been assassinated in that faraway city where I had grown up.

Behavior Problems?

Compendium of Rational Principles

Most people claim to be rational. But few have any idea of what that entails. Here is a list of articles that discuss the principles of logic, rational thought and related topics, such as evidence, truth and wisdom: